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Joyce is quoted in NYTimes Article, May 2013

"Joyce McFadden, a psychoanalyst and the author of "Your Daughter's Bedroom," said girls today are unprepared to withstand sophisticated efforts by corporations that prey on girls' desire to be popular. "As parents, we're so afraid to talk honestly with our daughters about their sexuality that we end up leaving them out in the cold," she said."

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Posts Tagged ‘September 11th’

Goodbye to More than DKNY

June 16, 2009 | Author joycemcfadden

Does anyone else feel sad that the longstanding DKNY mural at Houston and Broadway is now gone?

Since September 11th I’ve been hoping they were going to leave it there forever.

I was always fond of that mural as a symbol of a woman not only making it, but soaring into NYC fashion and commerce. And I loved the simple black and white image of all that would fit in a photo from uptown Manhattan: Brooklyn, Roosevelt Island, Queens and Staten Island, with the Statue of Liberty in the foreground and the Trade Towers in the distance.

Yesterday when we were having a conversation about architecture, my daughter told me she thought the Twin Towers were much warmer in feel than the Empire State Building. It’s taken her more than seven years to be able to talk about September 11th and her thoughts and memories are only now slowly starting to tumble out.

I can remember appreciating the Towers as a geographical anchor, but finding them cold and impersonal otherwise. Now they’re the most personal buildings in our country’s history.

The DKNY mural became an inadvertent sympathy card for the city that wanted to hold onto it for sentimental reasons and to help us remember.

Now it’s a big flat beige Hollister wall; the gateway to NYC as a mall.

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From the Day Terrorists Attacked My Neighborhood to Now

September 11, 2008 | Author joycemcfadden

I’ve never felt more female than the day I gave birth to my daughter. And I have never felt more human than the day I stood with my neighbors and watched the Twin Towers across the street from our homes burn and fall.

I never thought I would be in a position to feel the level of powerlessness someone feels as they watch thousands of lives end.

I never thought I would feel lucky to have my family survive an international incident on my block. I never imagined I would experience the sensation of running for my life with my daughter in my arms. I never thought I would be evacuated from my home or that my daughter’s school would turn into an Emergency Command Center, and the school beside hers a morgue.

I never dreamed that the opening of The Wonderful World of Disney show when Tinkerbell flies over the Magic Kingdom and sets off fireworks with her wand would be the only visual paradigm to capture the exploding silver façade of the second tower as it slowly came down glistening in the sun.

I never thought I would see fighter jets screaming over my head and wondering with thousands of others looking up at them, if they were ours.

I never thought I would have cause to feel so profoundly connected to my city and to my country.

And I never thought my leaders would squander the internationally unifying power of those moments.

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About My Work
After treating countless women who felt alone and isolated in experiences that they were unaware many other women were dealing with too, I began to ask what I could do to help them reach out to each other. The result was the launch of the Women’s Realities Study in which I interviewed hundreds of women from ages 18-105, about the most private issues as I sought to understand what events in a woman’s life impact her future happiness and self-confidence. What I found was truly revealing— the theme that most interested them as they explored their identities was how their relationship with their mothers influenced their understanding of themselves as sexual beings throughout their lives.

In my study of 450 women, they reveal that when their mothers conveyed that sexuality was somehow bad, or when they left sexuality out of the dialogue while they were growing up, it set them up to feel alienated from themselves--from their feelings, their instincts and their bodies.  This, in turn, made them lose faith in their mothers' ability to be there for them in the ways they needed, which created distance in the mother- daughter relationship over their lives together.
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